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The second WordCamp in Russia was a success, with almost 200 attendees and a great lineup of 14 speakers from all over Russia and abroad, including Ukraine and even Germany.

I’m not going to go into much planning details like I did last year. Everything was mostly the same, with the exception of having almost twice as many speakers, two tracks, pizza for lunch, a new logo (which everybody thought was a splash), as well as little irritating things that made planning more stressful — like the absence of parking spots close to the venue, problems with shipping anything from the US to Russia, and the fact that we bought about 10x more coffee than we ended up serving.

In any case, the post-WordCamp survey showed a 96% satisfaction rate, which definitely works for me. Now back to reading those new 4.0 commits, and still struggling for inbox zero, even though it’s been over a week now.

Photos from WordCamp Russia 2014 are on Facebook. Slides from my talk about scaling WordPress can be found here, the videos from all the sessions should appear on WordPress.tv in a few weeks.

Last year I spoke at WordCamp Sofia and the videos are finally up on WordPress.tv. I spoke about templating in WordPress, about how and why the template hierarchy works, and covered some of the core functions like locate_template() and filters like template_include.

A few days ago I attended and spoke at WordCamp Sofia 2013 which was a great deal of fun. Sofia is somewhat special for me, because that’s where it all began back in 2012 — that’s where I gave my first ever WordCamp talk, so this year’s event was like a little anniversary.

My session this year was about Templating in WordPress: locate_template() and its derivatives, the template hierarchy and template-loader.php. I wasn’t too nervous about my talk this time, in fact I didn’t even have any notes, and I think it turned out pretty well (although fairly short):

So “страшен” here supposedly means “awesome” or “amazing”, which is what my Bulgarian friends told me, though maybe they’re just being too nice to me, because Google Translate says that’s “terrible.”

Quite a few sessions were in English this year, which was good for me, though not necessarily good for the Bulgarian community — I felt like most people were shy to ask questions in English. In any case, it was a pleasure to listen to: Ryan Markel, Joe Hoyle, Noel Tock, Marko Heijnen, and Brian Messenlehner.

The after party had some poker chips we could exchange for drinks, which is pretty smart. Beer, wine, whiskey and late-night WordPress chatter.

Contribute Day was new for Sofia this year. It was held at SiteGround’s office with pizza, drinks, ping pong and pool. Not too many people attended, but we did have small groups working on translations, docs and themes, which turned out to be fun, and a little exhausting too:

I stayed at the amazing Sense Hotel this time. They have cool light controllers in rooms, that let you pick one of several modes: TV, reading, relaxing, etc.; keycard activated elevators: you don’t have to pick a floor — they know; and a solid internet connection, which is always a huge win.

Overall, I had a really great time, so huge props to Mario Peshev for the well organized event and looking forward to WordCamp Sofia next year!

If you have ever planned a WordCamp or any other similar event, you know that it’s a lot of hard work – speakers wrangling, volunteers, venue, food, drinks, video, photos and everything else. And now that it’s all over, let’s talk about WordCamp Russia.

I gave this talk in a couple of weeks ago at the very first WordCamp Russia 2013 which was a big success (will publish a recap separately).

It covers most of the basics: what is site speed and why it’s important, a little bit of object caching, transient caching, page caching, opcode caching, browser caching, image compression, etc. Before you hit “Play”, please note that the video is in Russian :)

If you have any questions, I’ll happily reply via comments or Twitter, both in English and Russian.

I first thought of making a WordCamp in Russia a little over three years ago, when I was running a web development shop in Moscow. I had filled out my application form and was a single click away from applying. I don’t quite remember what stopped me back then, but whatever it was, thank god!

I had no idea what it is like to organize a WordCamp, in fact, I haven’t been to a single WordCamp back then, except for a live stream or two. A lot of things have changed in the past three years: I attended, spoke and volunteered at quite a few WordCamps, I ran a monthly WordPress meetup for over a year, I made friends with many pro WordCamp organizers across the planet, and today I’m happy to announce that…

WordCamp Russia 2013 is this Saturday! If I had to express my excitement in exclamation marks, the MySQL server would try to return a result set which is too large and fail with a timeout error.

Everything is going fairly smoothly and we’re slowly approaching that OMGWTFBBQ planning phase. Watch out for recap posts in the coming weeks and don’t hesitate to visit us if you’re in Moscow this weekend.

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I'm Konstantin Kovshenin, a WordPress junkie and an Automattician living in Moscow, Russia. I love to contribute to WordPress and do other geeky stuff. If you need help with WordPress, don't hesitate to ping me. All posts are based on my opinion only.